Golf & Environment

Golf courses today are often designed to preserve the natural environment as much as possible and to provide an important habitat for wildlife and plant life, particularly in rural areas. Even more important, today’s maintenance practices minimize any potential for environmental harm. Indeed, Golf courses are known to be kinder to the environment than the typical residential lawn.

Today’s Golf courses are not only environmentally sensitive, but they can provide important environmental benefits such as making use of otherwise undesirable land, such as landfills and flood plains, but also are excellent means of disposing of effluent from waste water treatment plants.

The turfgrass that Golf courses utilize provide several very important environmental benefits.

According to Eliot Roberts, executive director of the Lawn Institute, turfgrass provide the following benefits:

1. Water Purification and Conservation. The biology of turfgrass soils make them a nearly ideal medium for biodegradation of all types of environmental contamination. Water is purified as it leaches through the root zone. Furthermore, soil microbes help break down chemicals, including turf pesticides, into harmless materials. As mentioned earlier, turfgrass is very effective in cleaning effluent.

2. Air Purification. An acre of turfgrass will absorb hundreds of pounds of sulfur-dioxide each year. Grass also takes in carbon dioxide, ozone, hydrogen fluoride, and peroxyacetyl nitrate and returns pure oxygen.

3. Oxygen Generation. One 40’ by 50’ patch of turfgrass will produce enough oxygen for one person for an entire year.

4. Soil Building. Grass is the most effective plant for conditioning the soil as turfgrass roots are continually developing, dying, decomposing and redeveloping. It is also known that mowed turfgrass provides better production of organic matter and more root productivity than ungrazed prairies.

5. Erosion Control. Grass roots help hold the soil in place while the leaves help protect the soil from blowing away.

6. Temperature Modification. Urban areas may be 9 to 13 degrees warmer than nearby rural areas. Green, growing turfgrass may be 38 deg F cooler than brown, dormant turfgrass and 70 deg F cooler than a synthetic surface. This is true because the grass not only scatters the light as well as absorbing some of the solar radiation, but it also cools itself and its surroundings through evapotranspiration process – each blade of grass acts like an evaporative cooler.